54 Comments

10 year warranty doesn't mean much. In 5 years, if it dies you would probably just replace it with something far faster and cheaper. The warranty doesn't get you your data back, it just gets you a replacement drive.After 3 years you might like a replacement drive, but much more than that and it becomes pretty meaningless to get a replacement slow/old drive considering how quickly SSDs have advanced. A 10 year warranty is pretty meaningless for this type of product, which is probably why Sandisk are happy to offer it. It gives false peace of mind and they know most people wouldn't take them up on it.Reply

-- but much more than that and it becomes pretty meaningless to get a replacement slow/old drive considering how quickly SSDs have advanced

We got the Great Recession because Bankster asserted that home prices, which had been exponentially rising, would do so forever. We're near, if not at, the asymptotic limit of node, esp. for NAND. Controller logic & error correction can do only so much.

If the industry can invent a smaller, non-destructive written, piece of memory (which responds to current semi-conductor logic) then may be. But, were I to be betting, I'd bet that consumer SSD will be only marginally better in 3 years.Reply

I'd argue raw bandwidth is really that important considering that RAM disks which is comfortably over 10 times faster than an SSD in terms of bandwidth for sequential and smaller reads still don't offer a huge performance improvement over an SSD that an SSD provides over an HDD (and even then, it's not linear). "Loading" at this point is initialization, and that depends entirely on software.

I suppose it'd be nice if we had universal memory, but SSDs are not a good candidate for that.Reply

I tell you what, I'd take that bet. With SATA being replaced as the primary interface and 3D NAND, I can easily see peak performance doubling in the next 3 years, and significant improvements in steady state performance.Reply

And what, exactly, will the normal SSD consumer (not an uber-gamer) do with that performance? Would s/he even notice? Will 3D NAND lower the price/byte to spinning rust? I wouldn't bet on that, either. My bet: in 3 years consumer SSD will still be performing "good enough" for Joe Sixpack at about the same price as "good enough" does today. What may be different: PC makers, if there are any left, will ship with an SSD rather than a HDD be default, and those with the need for mass storage will buy one with both.Reply

Performance is not the point - space is. You are correct that SSDs are already so fast that even a doubling ot tripling of perfomance will not make much of a difference.However, they are still too small. 256 Gb just doesn't cut it.... I am not exactly sure where I am going with this ;-)Reply

Typical usage patterns change with the technology available.Imagine when VR becomes common place. You'd want things to load almost instantaneously because once the computer experience becomes truly interactive, fast response times are so much more important.Reply

I LIKE YOU, AND THE WAY YOU THINK. I must add however, that storage and access is not a bottleneck for 3d environments at the moment. If you had such immense immersive environments that our current storage read times were being the bottleneck, I think 780 ti's would be worth 100$ comparitively.Reply

That's true to an extent.I have an OCZ Vertex 2 64Gb SSD which has been fantastically solid for years, if it died and I was able to get it replaced under warranty, I would throw it into a notebook and use the excuse to upgrade the SSD in my main desktop.

That said, the main benefit of an SSD over mechanical that an end-user will notice is not actually the read/write speeds, but rather the 0-latency access times which makes everything feel super snappy and responsive, improved reads/writes are just diminishing returns from an end users experience perspective, hence why I have kept my old Vertex 2 for so long.Reply

The Extreme II is actually more expensive at all price points except the minimum capacity (120GB) and it isn't always faster, either. The only reason to consider it is for a laptop (where Barefoot 3 makes no sense) if price is a concern.

However, I don't see any reason to get anything other than an MX100 for anything except high-performance applications. SleepDev, OPAL, PLP capacitors, solid reliability, lowest price of any SSD at mainstream capacities, and so on...Reply

Great article. I noticed that the SanDisk Extreme II consistently beats the OCZ ARC 100 and it has slumber power which helps in the laptop world. Nice that Newegg currently has the OCZ sale. So many choices... Reply

Haha, a reference sounds like a good idea. I've been trying to streamline the review process to get through my backlog quicker, so that is why it might seem like I'm cutting corners, but I'll take this into account :)Reply

Kris, Samsung EVO 256 doesn't cost that much. Its newegg price is 140$. In EU(amazon) for some weird reason MX100 and the EVO are almost the same price(130$ vs 140$). Furthermore the Arc 100 costs ~160$, which definitely makes it a way worse buy than the two other value choices over here.Reply

Ok mate. It seemed a little bit weird to me, because I read all the reviews/ssd recommendations here and the EVO 256 has been consistently priced @140$ in your tables for the past few months, so I went ahead and checked, hence the comment. It must have been an odd newegg one-day-fluctuation-thing yesterday then.Reply

$165 is the current Newegg price for the desktop bundle. The extra $25 gets you an adaptor that lets you plug the SSD into a USB port, the Magician software that Kristian praises below, and some other miscellany.Reply

I would go with the EVO because of Samsung's SSD Magician. Nothing in Magician is really necessary but some of the features can be handy and it is easier to use than many third party tools.

As for the NewEgg pricing, there seems to be something wrong with the 250GB link because it is constantly changing (leads to NewEgg front page now). I saw this happening yesterday already, so not sure if there is a way to fix it.Reply

The one thing I don't like about Magician is the fact that it can't do a secure erasemuch of the time (always says the SSD is locked) - one must do a separate bootand erase using a dedicated boot device, CD, USB, etc. By contrast, I've neverseen this happen with OCZ's Toolbox, it's always able to s/e an SSD.

Other than the above though, I happily use both brands of SSD (I have manyof each).

"The Barefoot 3 platform does provide excellent performance consistency and it has proven to be reliable over the last two years"

"The Barefoot 3 platform does provide excellent performance consistency...has proven to be reliable over the last two..."

"...excellent performance consistency...has proven to be reliable..."

"...consistency...reliable..."

Wut? You can't be serious. Go read the reviews by actual users. OCZ products have far higher one-star reviews and failures than any other serious equivalent. Or do you guys really think the rest of the world is wrong about their reliability and you're right? ;)Reply

OCZ's sample size was much smaller and there were only 13 one-star reviews in total, so the results are not really scientifically accurate. There were several one-star review due to the fact that OCZ denies warranty if bought from an uncertified reseller, so the number of failures is smaller in reality.

Either way, your claim that OCZ has "far higher one-star reviews" isn't true. It used to be true and I don't deny that, but the OCZ today is totally different company with new management and owner. Things are only going to get better with Toshiba helping OCZ with validation. Reply

Ah yes and no other manufacturer ever screwed things up?... In reality they've allchucked out bad fw, but people forgave the likes of Intel and Samsung when theydid that. OCZ changed its policies, started producing excellent models, yet peoplestill post the same old guff about Octane/Petrol models.

Nonsense. All that stuff was about much older models. The later OCZ SSDs are very good,everything from the Vertex4 onwards. Heck, with the early fw issues sorted out, the previousmodels are fine too, I have loads of them.

Ian.

PS. Buyer feedback on a seller site suffers from enormous -ve bias. People who don'thave any issues almost never state the fact. Sats: garbage in = garbage out.Reply

Management is still the same and by the CEO's own admission, they have been left largely alone for day-to-day operations. This product is yet another horrible idea just like Octane, Petrol, and Agility. They are undercutting their own product lines with inferior products and dumbfounded why their higher end products don’t sell. They need to follow what Samsung has done and release two product lines and keep it straight. Higher number product numbers = higher expected performance. Stop mixing and matching product lines and tagging them with meaningless numbers that have no sense of order or scale. They keep repeating the same mistakes that led them to bankruptcy and it’s why they won’t survive as a company.Reply

What toshiba needs to do is rebrand the whole thing; they could just continue using toshiba brandname as they did before ocz acq. but instead use oczs controller and firmware. And as you've said; two models. One highend with MLC flash and one mainstream with A19 tlc (sandisk already has one).

That way, product stack will be less of a mess and cost savings when using TLC could also translate to lower MSRP. Which is always good, when competition is stiff.Reply

Once you lose trust it's hard to gain it back. Hard drives are crucial for reliability with all your important data stored on it (and hopefully backed up) - living with the thought of just MAYBE my hard drive isn't good enough is more than enough to not buy that brand. And I was quick to jump on the OCZ bandwagon back when they were the first to bring reliable SSDs mainstream without write delays with the Vertex.Reply

So when Intel had its 8MB bricked-SSD problem, why weren't they villified by everyone andhence all trust lost?

The concept of trust for a technical product is bizarre. Either it works within a set range ofspecs & requirements, or it doesn't. OCZ makes a bunch of models that work very wellindeed (Vertex4, Vector, etc.), yet people act and post comments as if that's not true,which is just dumb IMO.

(checks the manufacturer)Yup, still OCZ. If I want to be a beta-tester for an unreliable and unscrupulous company, I'd go volunteer to be a guinea pig for someone contracting for the NSA. No thank you, never again.

There are probably 'good' reasons for it, but I really chuckle every time I think about Toshiba buying a brand name with a history of unreliable products and bad customer support, and then rebranding brand new tech with that tainted name.

For the love of pete, why why why?

Oh well. Best of luck to Toshiba, but I personally will never again buy anything on earth with 'OCZ' in the name.Reply

This logic is silly. You explicitly acknowledge that it is merely the same label on what is largely a different company, but you refuse to buy anything with the label because... reasons?

Granted, it was a poor choice by Toshiba to keep the OCZ branding, but I wager Toshiba management was unaware of how that brand was perceived when the decision was made. They probably thought they were appealing to an existing consumer-base who were loyal to the OCZ name or something.

But still, refusing to judge the product by its own merits (of which it seems to have a great deal, as long as you're not looking to use it in a laptop) but instead by the (now largely meaningless) label? Just seems silly to me.Reply

If Toshiba was unaware of the problems with OCZ's realizability and bad reputation, then Toshiba is incompetent. There is no way that a company would buy one that going bankrupt without doing the due diligence first. If they did, they would have seen all the problems. So what you are saying is no excuse.

But then, toshiba's reputation for SSD's isn't that great to begin with, so maybe they don't care.Reply

And exactly what reliability/reputation issues are you referring to? Because they applyto the later products at all, hence all this sort of posting does is perpetuate what is nowa thoroughly out of date attitude. Hardly surprising OCZ went bust when self-sustainingFUD posting keeps putting people buying what are actually really good products. I'dhappily buy more Vertex4s if they were still available at a sensible price. The only thingthat puts me off certain models much of the time, from any manufacturer, is price. In thepast 2 years, prices fluctuated wildly in a manner that left the Vector series costing fartoo much vs. the competition, which is a shame given the good quality of the product.

What blows my mind is the way people who moan on and on about quality, reliability,etc., are the same zoids who are so quick to recommend today's budget models likethe MX100 to someone for whom reliability is a priority - total contradiction.

If you've been burned by a Ford Pinto before, then it makes sense that you wouldn't want to buy a new Pinto, even if they tell you it's a complete redesign. Whether it makes sense or not, that's why Ford was smart enough to get rid of the Pinto name...Reply

In the article, I don't really see how the Arc 100 , Vector 150, Vertex 460 isn't OK for the laptop crowd. It is only taking half a watt at idle, less than a typical 5400RPM laptop drive of about 1 watt. It is unfortunate DIPM isn't supported but no big deal.

In the article, doesn't the Arc 100, Vector 150 and Vertex 460 all use the same 19nm flash, but you say the Arc 100 uses slower flash? I know the controller in the Vertex460 and Arc 100 is slower than in the Vector 150 (350 vs 400MHZ or so) and I think slightly slower DRAM cache speed.